Tizen Has Serious Momentum in India

I was fortunate enough to attend the third Tizen Developer Summit, hosted this year in Bengaluru, India. What a great experience!

As you might be aware, I recently joined Samsung from the Linux Foundation (more on this in the future), where I was the manager of the Tizen project. I’ve been involved in every Tizen event since the beginning, but there was something special about this one that felt like a milestone had been passed, and it wasen’t just because of the million Samsung Z1 smartphones that have been sold since launch.

People are Flocking to Tizen

I wasn’t surprised simply by the size of the event; there were more than one thousand attendees at what’s typically Tizen’s smaller event every year. Nor was I surprised by the 500 plus people that signed up for the Tizen DevLab, 2.5 times more people than we had seats for. Although it is pretty cool. What really surprised and impressed me was the quality of the attendees, and the depth of the existing Tizen knowledge they brought with them. This was apparent in the discussions I overheard, the questions that were asked during Q&A sessions, and side conversations between sessions.

Clearly people are building apps for Tizen; they are investing the time to understand the platform and they see the same bright future for the platform that we do.

Tizen on the Rise

I believe this is a turning point for Tizen. We’ve always said our events are the single best way to learn about Tizen development, and by attending, you are guaranteed to get face time with the world’s experts on Tizen to get fast and thorough answers to whatever questions you may have. Simply put, we hold these events to educate and inspire.

The app development community in and around Bengaluru is both skilled and large. As a city, it is world renowned as being the next Silicon Valley. The number of technical startups that are launched each month is stunning, and it’s obvious this is a community that knows their stuff about new technology.

It’s also worth noting that hotbeds of entrepreneurship and innovation exist because their citizens continually refine their focus on what’s big and what’s next. There are a lot of distractions with new technologies being pitched constantly, but these technical communities tend to be good at filtering down, and anticipating the next big thing.

After last week, it’s apparent Tizen is in a position to expand drastically into the Internet of Things, and there is a lot of work underway by local teams within Samsung to support this. We look forward to seeing what great things come out of tech communities like the one in Bengaluru

Let’s Work Together to Make Tizen Even Better

We’ve held five DevLabs this year already, and we’re actively working to build a Tizen community of users and developers. We are listening to you, we value your feedback and are using it to improve what we offer you, and most importantly, we want for you to connect with each other and share what you have learned.

Keep a close eye out, as we’ll be doing more over the next few months to help support this goal. We really believe in Tizen, and have great plans for it, and it’s fantastic to know the people who attended Tizen Developer Summit Bengaluru feel the same way. We’ve already started, so let’s keep building something awesome together!